TOYOTA's I ROAD FAILURE and how they have shifted to the TvA/ FTC system:

There have been three attempts by major auto companies to create a simple steer tilting vehicle.Mercedes , BMW and now Toyota have made substantial investments . They all knew that for large scale take up the vehicle must be automatically balanced but the control systems used failed to focus on the basic point.

Any tilting vehicle system must tilt before it steers. Any vehicle that steers its wheels first, whether its the rear wheel/s or the front wheel/s, will create an inertia reaction to tilt / roll the vehicle in the opposite direction to the steered path. We all observe this in any motorcar, steer left, roll right. In other words a conventional car rolls/ tilts in the wrong direction and is supported by its springs to limit roll. The engineers in these three large companies developed tilting vehicle systems whereby the driver was connected to the steerable wheels and so, as soon as the driver made any input onto his/her control, "Centrifugal Force" was generated to tilt the vehicle in the wrong direction.

The common remedy was then to apply an on board generated force[ hydraulic electric etc] acting on the tiltable vehice section to force the vehicle to tilt/ roll in the right direction into the corner- not out of the corner. However the common problem remained that the actuators needed to force the vehicle to tilt against the Centrifugal force that the steer had just created .This is the mistake all of these companies shared.

Realizing their mistake, BMW and TOYOTA then set about to delay the steer of the wheels so that a computer could calculate the required tilt and apply the tilt first before the vehicle steered. The failure of the BMW Clever is well documented and Mercedes destroyed all of their Life jets. Toyota also suffered from their attempts to delay the steer. read below a test drive report [ Car and Driver]:

I had contact with both BMW and TOYOTA and I directed both companies to my original patent application. I pointed out that the preferred system is not to connect the driver to the steerable wheels, but instead to connect the driver to the tiltable vehicle section. Now , with the driver directly tilting and positively controlling the tilt position... the front steerable wheels are free to castor onto the correct steer angle for the tilt and the speed.

Centrifugal Force was never created in the TvA tilt control sequence and the only force required was a force to move the tilt from one position to a new position. So, instead of 3,000PSI in the actuators as seen in the Mercedes Life Jet.... I see a spike of 200psi and then only when shifting the vehicle tiltable mass fast. In a steady state there is zero PSI.

Now back to TOYOTA and the current I Road and how they will shift to FTC systems in a new vehicle. Toyota currently avoid centrifugal force by delaying the steerable wheels response to driver input and they use the driver input signal to tilt the vehicle into the corner first. This is very similar to the revised system on the BMW Clever. Then, after the computer has assessed the tilt angle required for the vehicle speed judged by the magnitude/ speed of the drivers input and other sensors, a signal is sent to the actuator/s to position the vehicle on/near the calculated tilt angle and then the rear wheel steers the vehicle onto the path .

The result so achieved will never be satisfactory as the test drivers noted above.

On the other hand observe the TvA tilter in the video sequences [ above] where fast and unified tilt and steer is obvious and also the comments from the test driver in the video. The TvA system shows absolutely no traces of delay unlike the Toyota and the tilting and steering is precise and predictable even on the skid pan where it is faster than most cars against the clock.

Even though it appears to the driver and to the cameras that the TvA steers and tilts simultaneously, there is an undetectable delay that blocks the creation of Centrifugal Force. This delay is dynamically and naturally created and maintained; as the tilt creates the steer .[ above aprox 5mph]. The front wheel/s are always on the optimum steer angle. No computer is involved just the natural world.

THERE WILL NEVER BE ANY ELECTRONICS THAT WILL MATCH FTC

SO now, finally after many years of delay ,Toyota are developing a tilting vehicle based on the TVA system [ FTC], and for that I congratulate them . see patent application

"The power rush moved the i-Road out of the hole with such authority that we very nearly overshot the first corner on the impromptu racetrack. We then actually overshot it while coming to grips with the delay between cranking the steering wheel and the i-Road’s rear wheel affecting directional change. Failing to account for the time it takes for the body to lean itself and the whole apparatus to take a set, we dove for the apex only to miss and hit several cones marking the outside of the turn. The next turn was marginally more successful, but our lead feet still had us entering the corner too hot. The steering-wheel rim again angrily vibrated its scorn for our pace, but we carved a cleaner, cone-free line.Every time the steering wheel vibrated, it wasn’t immediately apparent whether the front or the rear tires were letting go, or if all three still had grip and we had run up against the stabilizing limit of the lean actuators and the electric steering."